When you cannot see the rule being broken
Courts in England and Wales will now take Meta glasses off you at the door. Recording inside a court was already unlawful, so this is not a new rule. It is an admission that the old one only worked while a breach was visible.
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Meta glasses confiscated at the door of every court in England and Wales
Reported on 11 August. His Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service confirmed that Meta glasses are prohibited across the criminal, civil and family courts it runs, and that anyone arriving with a pair will have them taken at entry and returned on the way out. Phones are still allowed on the understanding they are not used to record, and HMCTS made no equivalent allowance for the glasses, its spokesperson saying only that there are clear restrictions on taking images or video inside courts. The trigger is easy to see in a High Court case earlier this year, where a claimant was accused of being coached through smart glasses during cross examination, which he denied.
The Guardian - 02
Gemini passes a billion people using it every month
Sundar Pichai posted the number on 11 August: the Gemini app now has over a billion monthly users, up from 400 million in May last year and 900 million in May this year. The details are more useful than the headline. Google says 63% of people talk to it rather than type, one in five Gemini Live sessions involves the camera or a shared screen, and it will now carry out tasks across more than 40 Android apps. No subscriber figure was given, so this counts people who opened the app, not people paying for it.
Google - 03
ChatGPT and Codex get a proper Linux app, in preview
Out on 11 August as a preview, not a finished release: native .deb and .rpm packages covering Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04 LTS, Debian 13 and Fedora 43 and 44, on both x64 and ARM, bundling ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work and Codex. It completes the set, since the desktop app already existed on Windows and Mac. One detail worth noticing before anyone installs it on a work machine: the installer adds OpenAI's own package repository to the system, so future updates arrive through the same channel as your operating system patches.
TechCrunch - 04
A bitcoin miner signs a 20-year power lease worth 9.1 billion dollars
In its second quarter results on 10 August, Riot Platforms disclosed a 20-year lease of 191 megawatts at its Rockdale campus in Texas to what it described only as a leading frontier AI lab, expected to bring in around 9.1 billion dollars over the initial term and up to 16.1 billion if both five-year extensions are taken. Bloomberg named the tenant as Anthropic, citing people familiar with the deal; Riot has not confirmed it. Capacity does not land until December 2027 and is not fully deployed until June 2028, which tells you how far ahead the compute behind your monthly subscription is now being booked.
Riot Platforms - 05
Nvidia lines up over 500 billion dollars of other people's money
Announced 10 August: Nvidia has signed memoranda of understanding with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to set up financing platforms aimed at mobilising more than 500 billion dollars for data centres, power and the rest of the AI buildout. Each firm underwrites and deploys through its own platform, which keeps the borrowing off Nvidia's balance sheet. Read the status honestly: these are memoranda, final agreements are still to be executed, and nothing has been lent yet.
Nvidia - 06
Congress asks OpenAI and Anthropic how their agents got out
On 10 August, House Democrats sent letters to both labs about the July disclosures that agents broke out of their test environments and reached other companies' systems. Twenty-nine signatures went to OpenAI, led by Greg Casar and Doris Matsui, and twenty-two to Anthropic, asking how agents are monitored during testing, whether safety controls were evaded, and what has changed since. They also want hearings. It is a letter rather than a law, but it is the first time the containment failures have been put to the labs in writing by people who can compel an answer.
CNBC
Recording inside a court was already unlawful, and had been for a long time. The ban was never the missing piece. What made it work was that you could see it being broken: someone lifts a phone in the public gallery, an usher notices, and the rule enforces itself at almost no cost to anybody. Glasses took that away. So HMCTS did the only cheap thing left and moved the check from the room to the door. Nobody now has to judge whether you were recording, because nobody could. That is a worse rule in every way except the one that matters, which is that it can actually be applied by a person on a door at half past nine in the morning.
That same trade is going to reach ordinary firms, and it will not arrive as a decision you get to make. It will arrive as a line in somebody else's site rules. Plenty of jobs already restrict cameras: data centres, custodial work, anything MoD adjacent, and any residential client who does not want their half finished kitchen on someone's Instagram. Those clauses were written when a camera was a thing you held up, and from direct experience in construction I can tell you the review does not happen in an office. It happens at the gate, with a security man, a box, and your programme already running. So the small useful job this week is to read your own induction and find out whether it says no recording or no recording devices. Those are different sentences, and only one of them still means anything.
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